Interview

Tell us a little bit about yourself/company/team?
We are an indie game development company created in Asturias, Spain, and have released many successful titles on Xbox Live Indie Games. Our games feature polished gameplay and high production values.

What made you decide to use the XBLIG platform for your game?
Our first game, Little Racers, was a hobby project that we did on our free time. We chose XBLIG because there were very few options to market an independent game on a non-mobile device and it was easier to develop on a closed platform as the Xbox 360. After the unexpected success of the game, we just kept releasing games on that platform. We’ve tried other platforms in the past, but there’s no magical platform yet.

What was the biggest hurdle in getting this game finished?
Usually our biggest hurdle is to cut somewhere and polish everything. The only exception has been Raventhorne, were we had a tight deadline so we ended up cutting before we intended.

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Tell us a little bit about yourself/company/team?
Discord was formed in 2009 by life-long friends James Petruzzi and Tim Dodd. Our original intention was to kill time, and have fun creating stuff. At some point we realized we had a shot at doing something really cool and unique, so we put our heads down and started working on what was to become Take Arms.

What made you decide to use the XBLIG platform for your game?
I think both of us have always wanted a game on a console, and XBLIG is the easiest path to that. No publishing deals, devkits, etc. are needed. It’s an awesome platform, just a shame it isn’t a little better managed.

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Tell us a little bit about your team?

We are two standard Italian nerds. Francesco, from Benjamin Ficus production, is responsible for the plot, level design and guilty of all the misspellings. Despite his love of creating video games, his computer skills suck hard He was lucky enough to find Matteo, his colleague. Matteo, from HeartBit interactive, is the genius behind the programming.

What made you decide to use the XBLIG platform for your game?

Around two years ago, Francesco made a game with RPG Maker. It was a small but fun adventure of four nerds trapped in a fantasy world. Everybody (his friends and his mum) was pleased with the game and kept telling him “You got talent”, “You should make some money with it”, and “Eat your vegetables” so Francesco decided to turn his small project into a real game! He discovered that a friend of a friend (Matteo, from HeartBit interactive) was a very talented programmer who already worked in the amazing field of game development. Francesco showed his project to Matteo who said “your game is pretty cool, why don’t we collaborate to put it on Xbox Live Indie Games. You do the level design, story and other crap while I do the serious coding and programming. It shouldn’t take much time, right?”

TWO years later, here we are!
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Tell us a little bit about yourself/company/team?

We’re a young Dutch company, consisting of two guys; Casper van Est and Gert-Jan Stolk. We founded DoubleDutch Games in 2010, and Speedrunner is our first game.

What made you decide to use the XBLIG platform for your game?

Well, XBLIG is basically the only option you have when you’re a new studio with no track record and no money and want to make games for a console. It’s a really great platform for people like us, as it allowed us to actually create a product and have it released. We’ll have to see whether or not it’s actually a viable platform for making enough money to keep our heads above the water, but then again, we hope it can serve us as a stepping stone to other platforms such as Steam and XBLA.

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XBLAFans’ coverage of San Diego Comic Con isn’t all text and hands on, we’ve also got an interview with the one and only Dan Paladin of The Behemoth.

Dan Paladin and Todd Schlickbernd discuss all things Battleblock Theater. Dan discusses some of the methods in which Battleblock has been influenced by Castle Crashers and its massive community. Of course the meat of the talk is all things Battleblock including a detailed description of the game’s player to player trading function.

The Behemoth and XBLAFans are crashing down the theater in this interview so be sure to check it out. For some related reading, head on over to our hands-on preview of Battleblock Theater‘s story mode.

[podcast]https://xblafans.com/xblafancast/BattleblockInterview.mp3[/podcast]

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Éric Chahi is well-known in the industry for his innovative work on Another World (called Out of This World in the U.S.) and Heart of Darkness—and for his nearly ten-year absence from the industry. XBLA Fans sat down at E3 2011 with the legendary game designer for a quiet chat about art, inspiration, and the craft of telling stories.

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Eric Chahi, Creative Director for From Dust, talks up the game with Wired, describing the dynamic terrain, the importance of music in the game, and the real time evolution of …
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The following article is based around an email interview conducted by our team with Naked Sky’s CTO Joshua Glazer. Naked Sky is also known for their previous XBLA title RoboBlitz, which was released back in November 2006z.

Microbot is a twin stick shooter that lets the player battle malicious viruses and diseases as a microscopic nanotech robot injected into someone’s bloodstream. As players travel travel through veins, bones, lungs and other organs, they can collected data fragments that allows them to customize their microbot with powerful weapons, defensive systems, movement parts, and special abilities. What got yours truly’s blood pumping about this title, is the planned cooperative drop-in/drop-out mode.
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This interview was conducted at the Casual Connect 2010 conference in Hamburg. It was used for a short article that created a lot of buzz about Microsoft turning down the chance to publish Machinarium on Xbox Live Arcade by Microsoft. Although our focus is Xbox Live Arcade related content, our editorial staff agreed that the following is an exception due to the recent circumstances.

Jakub Dvorksy, currently the lead designer at the Czech indie studio Amanita Design, is the original founder of the studio and brought together the team of creatives and artists that have been responsible for the highly acclaimed point and click adventure Machinarium. We recently had the pleasure of talking to this self-taught leader and look back at the history of the little studio in the Czech Republic.
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